Bellaire police shooting unearths racial unease

Bellaire police shooting unearths uneaseMinorities say police have a habit of focusing on them

MIKE TOLSON, Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, January 11, 2009

Photo: COURTESY OF JULIE SOEFER

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Robbie Tolan, shown Jan. 5, was taken to Ben Taub General Hospital after the shooting. He may have a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life. The District Attorney's Office is investigating the shooting.

Robbie Tolan, shown Jan. 5, was taken to Ben Taub General Hospital after the shooting. He may have a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life. The District Attorney's Office is investigating the shooting.

When Vincent Nelson began to eye property not far from the Texas Medical Center, his gaze turned toward Bellaire: a comfortable, mostly affluent enclave in the middle of Houston.

The 36-year-old anesthesiologist found a home to his liking, pleasant neighbors, good schools and an attentive police force. A little too attentive, he began to think.

"My first year there, I was stopped four times," said Nelson, who has lived in the bedroom community of 15,000 for 3½ years. "They usually stopped me and questioned why I was in the neighborhood. There was a general unpleasantness with every stop."

After receiving a ticket on the fourth stop — "He said I didn't have my seat belt on, and I did" — Nelson went to police headquarters to complain. He said he eventually received an apologetic phone call.

Even though he has not been stopped since, Nelson said he's seen no evidence of a broad change in police behavior or what he believes to be unwarranted questioning.

"I have a friend who's a pilot and one who's a builder, one black and one Hispanic, and they live in Bellaire and have experienced the same thing," he said. "We've talked about it. One time, the builder was moving some furniture out of his house, and the police came up and thought he was stealing it."

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When news broke about the shooting of Robbie Tolan, a 23-year-old Bellaire resident who was wounded by police in his own front yard Dec. 31, it came as no great surprise to many of the city's African-American residents, who wondered whether he had been the victim of racial profiling. Blog sites began buzzing with recollections of police encounters past.

But much of this is news to Bellaire's mayor, Cindy Siegel, who said she has heard no complaints from the city's minority residents about police treatment.

She said she has been stopped by police herself as she drove or walked through her neighborhood. She characterized the police presence as reassuring, not intrusive.

"Am I going to say there's no racial profiling? I don't know," Siegel said. She said she didn't recollect anyone coming forward about it.

"We want to address it," she said. "If we've got a problem, we're going to fix it. There's no place in city government for treating people differently because of their race and sex."

A complaint after an arrest

Siegel did recall one complaint made to City Council in August - by a minority couple from Houston who police thought may have shoplifted from a Bellaire grocery store. According to minutes of the meeting, a store manager had pointed them out while they waited for a bus as a couple who had stolen meat. The husband and wife were handcuffed, searched and detained before being released.

The two denied stealing anything and complained to the City Council that they had been victims of racial profiling.

Bellaire Police Chief Randall Mack, who has been with the department three decades, said he does not believe his officers single out minorities who live in the city or drive through it.

"Myself and our employees build a concerted effort and process to educate and train our officers regarding the elements of racial profiling, cultural diversity and cultural sensitivity," Mack said. "Our policies and practices prohibit racial profiling. An established process is in place to readily receive and investigate any and all allegations of racial profiling."

Bellaire's police department has 41 full-time officers, Mack said. Thirteen are Hispanic, two are black and the rest are white. The department received two complaints of racial profiling in 2007 and concluded both were unfounded. "I and our members do experience frustration when we hear of racial profiling allegations when these allegations were previously unknown to us," he said. "We encourage those who believe they have been subject to racial profiling to contact us."

Mack, however, might have a hard time convincing some of his city's 150 or so black residents that they are not being picked on. For 13 years, Keith Guillory lived in Bellaire, and he believes his skin color was the only reason he attracted the interest of police.

"I was walking down the street one day with my wife and children, and a police officer stopped and asked me what I was doing there," said Guillory, a 48-year-old real estate agent who moved out of Bellaire in 2006. "I told him, `I live here.' He sped off. They harassed me all the time."

Guillory, like Nelson, said he and other minority residents swapped tales of what they considered police harassment. His favorite recent story involved a black friend who was on a ladder in his front yard a few weeks ago, stringing Christmas lights.

"An officer pulled up and asked him what he was doing and if the owner of the house knew what was going on," Guillory said. "He told him that he was the owner. He said the cop looked embarrassed and drove off."

Racial questions about Bellaire have bubbled to the surface before. Over the years, the city has received attention for a wide disparity in the racial demographics of those receiving traffic tickets in the city and those who live there.

In 2007, according to statistics, 35 percent of the traffic stops made by Bellaire police involved white drivers, even though the city is almost 90 percent white. Black drivers represented 22 percent of the stops and Hispanics 35 percent. Only 17 percent of the 461 people arrested after a stop were white.

City officials, however, say Bellaire's racial demographics do not accurately reflect the drivers who travel its major roads, which includes a portion of Loop 610 West. They say the ticketing breakdown more or less reflects the population of Houston, which was approximately 31 percent white, 25 percent black and 37 percent Hispanic as of the 2000 Census.

Athletes also speak up

Celebrity residents have not been immune from police contact. Tolan's father, Bobby, was a major league baseball player, and the son starred at Bellaire High School.

Jose Cruz Jr., a former Bellaire High School and Rice University baseball standout and son of the one-time Astros star hitter, told a Houston television station last week that he, too, had been stopped by Bellaire police as an adult in 2002, an incident he said prompted him to move from his old hometown.

He said he was in a new car with his pregnant wife when a police officer stopped him because of an absent front license plate. He said he believed he was racially profiled.

"The officer proceeded to arrest me," Cruz told KHOU-TV (Channel 11). "He told me that there were warrants out for my arrest. I told him that I didn't have so much as a ticket, much less a warrant."

Because of the mistake, Cruz said, he ended up spending the night in jail.

The Tolan investigation

Siegel did not comment on the Tolan case. She said she was happy that an independent agency, the Harris County District Attorney's Office, is tasked with investigating why Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton shot Tolan after he parked his SUV in the driveway of the home he shares with his parents.

Bellaire police have said an officer checked the license plates on Tolan's vehicle and it came back as stolen, which brought several officers to the home. Police acknowledged the report was in error.

Tolan was shot as he lay on the ground in front of his house. He was protesting an officer's treatment of his mother when he was shot once in the chest, his family said.

Tolan's lawyers have accused police of targeting his 2004 Nissan Xterra because the occupants were black. The lawyers claim white residents would not have been approached with guns drawn.

Mack has denied the incident involved racial profiling but has not commented on any details of the officers' actions, citing the ongoing investigation.

Why officers were checking the plates on a vehicle that Tolan has driven in the area for four years is one of many questions to be answered by the district attorney's inquiry - and one that is of particular interest to Mark Latigue, a black Bellaire resident who owns a catering business.

Latigue, 39, said he was leaving his home in his Ford minivan just before Christmas when an officer who had been parked down the street pulled him over. He said the officer checked his plates for no particular reason.

"He said my license plates came back saying they belonged to a Ford truck, and (he) thought it might be stolen," Latigue said.

He recalled two other recent minor incidents that disturbed him. Latigue said Bellaire police stopped him as he returned from a grocery store late at night, accused him of speeding, then did not give him a ticket. He also said an officer shouted at him rudely as he attempted to maneuver past a patrol car to get to his driveway.

"It was very unnecessary and very embarrassing for him to do it in front of my kid," Latigue said.

Siegel said if Latigue and other minority residents are angered by police actions, they should band together and make themselves heard.

"If residents can come talk to us about dog poop in their yards or how wide their sidewalk is, they can come talk to us about this," she said. "It is much more serious."